Thesis: Eunuchs are Gay Men

(with a listing of secondary sources)

by Faris Malik

One day
I read in the Bible that Jesus said there were eunuchs who were born so
from their mother's womb.1 To my knowledge, a eunuch
was a man who had been castrated, so how could he be born that way? As
a translator by profession, I was aware that ideas are sometimes distorted
in translation, and that this was particularly a problem in the Bible.
In this case, the context was about men's obligation to marry, and these
and other kinds of eunuchs were said to be exempt. As a proud gay man and,
at that time, a Christian, I was intrigued by this. Since I firmly believed
(and still do) that I was born gay and that, on this basis, it would be
a bad idea for me to marry a woman, it occurred to me that a so-called
born eunuch might mean a gay man like myself.2

The common denominator in gay men and castrated men,
which could be the basis for categorizing both groups under the term eunuch,
is that neither one is suitable for marriage. This indeed was the point
of the gospel verse. But in order to prove beyond a doubt that born eunuchs
were gay men, I had to prove that, like gay men:

(1) born eunuchs could have complete genitals, (2) they had no lust for women, and (3) they had lust for men.

There is little agreement nowadays about what
causes sexual orientation and what it consists of. Some say it is a matter
of genetics, others that it is caused by psychological influences in early
childhood. Still others say that it is fluid and changeable over the course
of a person's life. To my mind, the best way to accommodate all of these
ideas within one system is to say that most people are born bisexual, but
a few are not. Most of the born bisexuals learn to avoid homosexual interaction.
Europeans and Americans are raised to suppress homosexual erotic impulses,
and direct their sexual attention exclusively to the opposite sex, so their
so-called straight orientation is a result of environmental factors, which
can change over time. Some resist the indoctrination and express both sides
of their sexual nature freely -- these are what our society calls bisexuals.
But a small percentage of people genetically just don't have the capacity
to feel attraction to the opposite sex. These are the people who say they
were born gay. I am one of them. By the same token, just as few people
lack the capacity to feel attraction to their own sex. In this culture,
these people simply blend in with the majority.

A bisexual in my terminology is anyone who
genetically is able to feel lust for men and women. This describes the
majority of people. What we call a "straight person" is, in most cases,
a bisexual who has been conditioned to avoid acting on his or her homosexual
side. Gay people are monosexuals who are genetically unable to feel lust
for their respective opposite sex. A few straights are monosexual like
gays, in that they are genetically unable to feel lust for people of their
own sex. I believe this inability has something to do with some people
lacking sexual pheromone receptors for one sex or the other. The argument
I am making in this essay is that men who were genetically unable to feel
lust for women, i.e. what we call gay men today, were called eunuchs by
our pre-Christian ancestors.

Almost all current dictionaries define a eunuch
as a man missing a crucial part of his reproductive anatomy, either due
to castration or birth defect. But I will show in Section 1 of this essay
that most so-called "eunuchs" in the ancient world were not anatomically
deprived and were able to procreate. Moreover in Section 2, I show that
one of the central defining characteristics of a eunuch in the ancient
world was his lack of a sexual drive for women, something which is not
true of castrated men. Men who lust after women will continue to do so
even if they are genitally mutilated. Castration may prevent a straight
man from impregnating a woman, but it will not change his desires. In Section
3, I show that eunuchs were stereotyped as lustful sex objects for men.

When I began my research back in 1991, I set out
to define the category Jesus had called the "born eunuch," which was something
different from a castrated man, or "man-made eunuch."

The oldest available version of Matthew is
a translation probably from Aramaic or Hebrew into Greek,3and the word used in the Greek translation is eunouchos,
from which we get our word eunuch. The word eunouchos
comes
from eune (bed) and echein
(to hold), and most scholars accept that it means "one who guards the bed."
But Jesus would not have used the Greek word, since he spoke Aramaic. The
Hebrew and Aramaic word for eunuch is saris,
an Assyrian loan word that has been interpreted to mean "at the head."4Neither of these etymologies ruled out my hypothesis that born eunuchs
were, in general, anatomically whole like gay men. Later I learned that
an ancient Syriac translation of the Bible used the word mu'omin
for eunouchos and saris.
Mu'omin
means "person of faith" or "person of trust."

I began a search lasting several years to find
proof, either that a born eunuch was born missing some male reproductive
parts, or that he simply lacked desire for women. The field of evidence
I had to search through consisted of dozens, even hundreds, of ancient
texts in which eunuchs were mentioned. By analyzing what each author or
text said about an individual eunuch or about the category of eunuchs,
I could put all the texts together and observe the common trends in the
way ancient authors defined eunuchs.

An ancient Roman novel I had read in
college, Petronius's Satyricon, raised an initial theoretical problem
for my thesis, however. The Satyricon is a comic novel about two
men lusting after a teenage boy. Most people today, at least in Europe
and America, would identify them as gay men because of their homosexual
lifestyle, but none of the main characters called themselves eunuchs. In
fact, there are scads of homosexually active men throughout Greek and Roman
literature who are not called eunuchs. This can be explained in two ways.

First, homosexual behavior, though disapproved
of particularly for the passive partner, was tolerated a lot more in ancient
Greece and Rome than it has been in modern Europe and the United States.
Significant numbers of Greek and Roman men appear to have been actively
bisexual: having sex with other men, but also fulfilling their marriage
duties. I hear that is still the custom today in those countries. So it
is possible and even likely that many younger Roman men, without actually
being born gay, avoided the responsibilities of marriage by pursuing a
wholly homosexual lifestyle. This would certainly fit the carefree character
of the protagonists in the Satyricon. Nothing prevents bisexuals
from getting married, though, so they would not be eunuchs.

On the other hand, unless you wanted a job
as a domestic servant for women or at the imperial court, being known as
a eunuch in Rome entailed no special advantage. On the contrary, eunuchs
were ridiculed in ancient Greece and Rome like gays are today. Xenophon,
the Greek historian of the fifth century BCE, wrote: "There is not a man
in the world who would not think he had the right to overreach a eunuch."
So even if a man was a born eunuch (and the first-person narrator of the
Satyricon
does betray some anxiety about his own ability to perform with women),
he might very well not want to carry that label.

The first place I looked for evidence about
born eunuchs was a religious reference work called the Theological Dictionary
of the New Testament. The article on the word eunouchos
by Johannes Schneider stated that the Greek word appeared in two chapters
in the New Testament, and the Hebrew word saris
occurred 40 times in the Old Testament5 (which latter
figure I later discovered was an underestimate). Moreover, Schneider asserted
that many men were called saris in the Old
Testament who were not actually eunuchs, by which he meant to say they
were not castrated. Schneider also mentioned a discussion in the Talmud
concerning differences between born versus man-made eunuchs.6Of course, this was just the kind of source text I was looking for: ancient
scholars arguing over what a born eunuch was. I will present and analyze
the evidence that I found below, but for now I am merely retracing my steps
in my research.

From Schneider I learned of an articlepublished in Germany just before World War I, concerning the attitudes
of the early church fathers to eunuchs, and their interpretations of Matthew
19:12.7 On the "eunuch"
shelf at the library, I found a recent German book on eunuchs in classical
Greece and Rome which provided a list of names of eunuchs. That book cited
another German article concerning the word eunouchos
and related terms in secular Greek and Latin sources.8This article referred me to a still another German articleon eunuchs, with extensive references to ancient sources, in a nineteenth-century
encyclopedia of classical Greek and Roman historical figures and literature.9I compiled a list of over 500 classical references to eunuchs from these
German secondary sources, and I determined to look up as many as I could
get hold of.

Thank goodness, German is my second language.
I could never have gotten off the ground with this project if I did not
know German. Whatever else you might say about Germany, it has produced
some thorough and conscientious scholars. I am grateful that some of them
chose to direct their attention to eunuchs. Thank goodness, too,
that I took Greek and Latin in college, and that my alma mater is U.C.
Berkeley, which has one of the world's greatest libraries and grants borrowing
privileges to its alumni.

I collected references to eunuchs in the Bible
using Young's Analytical Concordance to the Bible, finding forty-five
rather than forty Old Testament verses containing the word saris,10in addition to the two New Testament chapters referring to eunuchs.11 Later I also found eight apocryphal verses using the word eunouchos.12
I had to learn a little Hebrew to look up the Old Testament references.

None of the Bible verses indicated that eunuchs
were castrated. And a verse about castration, Deuteronomy 23:1, said nothing
about eunuchs. What's more, looking in the concordance, I discovered something
very strange. The King James Version translates saris
variously as chamberlain, eunuch, officer, or as a proper name Rabsaris
(literally "chief eunuch"). As a translator, I was appalled at the inconsistency,
which to me smacked of a cover-up of some kind. I checked Martin Luther,
who translated the German Bible. He was more consistent in his mistranslation,
using Kämmerer or Erzkämmerer
(chamberlain or head chamberlain) in every single case except Isaiah 56:3-5
and Matthew 19:12. In Matthew, Martin Luther translates the born eunuch
category as "es sind etliche verschnitten, die sind
aus Mutterleibe also geboren" or in English, "there are some cut
(!) who are born so from their mother's womb." Ouch!

Schneider's article offered an explanation,
albeit somewhat implausible, for the inconsistency in translation. He said
that the term saris had a dual meaning, with
the other being "palace official." Apparently, sarisim
had participated in religious rites (Jeremiah 34:19), which would be impossible
if they were castrated. Deuteronomy 23:1 says castrated men cannot enter
the congregation of the Lord. Therefore, modern religious scholars, assuming
all eunuchs were castrated, concluded that a saris
must not necessarily be a eunuch. But Isaiah 56:3-5 and Matthew 19:12 clearly
imply that the procreative ability of a saris
is compromised somehow. It sounds unlikely to me that a term that implies
one is not fully male would also be used to cover ordinary men, especially
when there were other perfectly good words for palace officials. I see
no reason why those sarisim participating
in religious rites could not be uncastrated, born eunuchs.

From Greece, Rome, and the Bible, I expanded
my search for eunuchs to other ancient cultures and spiritual traditions,
and some of my most helpful resources were the following.

A friend of mine who studies ancient Egypt
turned me on to a book about the Egyptian mythical figure Seth,13which provided several references to articles about homosexuality and eunuchs
in ancient Egypt.

Bernadette Brooten's Love Between Women
provided references to ancient astrologists who wrote about eunuchs and
other homosexuals.14

David Greenberg's The Construction of Homosexuality
referred to a French-language article on homosexuality in an encyclopedia about the Sumero-Babylonian and Assyrian
cultures.15 That and another articlefrom the same encyclopedia, on eunuchs,16 provided important
references. Greenberg's book, an exhaustive cross-cultural history of homosexuality,
also contained references to eunuchs and third-gender roles in traditional
African communities which paralleled the understanding of eunuchs in ancient
Middle Eastern cultures.17 [Since composing this website,
I found a great new book on Africa edited by Stephen O. Murray and Will
Roscoe, Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities,
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.]

In addition, while studying circumcision rituals
(which I have come to believe are derived from a primeval association between
holiness and a diminished capacity for sexual pleasure), I came across
an anthropological report of a spiritual role reserved for unmanly men
among the Mbo people of Zaire.

[Also since first posting this website, I was
introduced to the work of Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé, a married couple
who both come from the town of Dano in Burkina Faso and write about Dagara
rituals and spirituality for a broad audience. Sobonfu Somé's book
The
Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient Teachings in the Ways of Relationships
contains a chapter on "Homosexuality: The Gatekeepers," in which she writes,
"Gatekeepers are people who live a life at the edge between two worlds
-- the world of the village and the world of the spirit."]

Murray and Roscoe's Islamic Homosexualities
and Shaun Marmon's Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society,
as well as the Encyclopedia of Islam, provided references to eunuchs
in Islam.

Zia Jaffrey's recent study of eunuchs currently
living in India,18 and a psychological study called The
Life Style of the Eunuchs,19 provided insight into
the lives of contemporary Indian eunuchs as well as references to traditional
Indian sources.

An early twentieth-century book by Richard
Millant, entitled Les Eunuques à travers les Ages or "eunuchs
across the ages," gave some juicy anecdotes, but not enough references
to primary sources. Like most modern scholars, Millant was operating from
an assumption that being a eunuch meant being castrated. Without being
able to check his sources for myself, I could not challenge his interpretations.
Eventually, though, I found many of Millant's sources through the German
articles and other secondary sources.

Taisuke Mitamura's Chinese Eunuchs: The
Structure of Intimate Politics was also stingy with footnotes, and
anyway I could not check its references for lack of translations of the
original sources into European languages. Mitamura did mention a nineteenth-century
article on Chinese eunuchs by a European named G. Carter Stent ("Chinese
Eunuchs," in Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic
Society, New Series No. 11, Shanghai, 1877, pp. 143-184), who, like
Millant, provides lots of interesting references, but also assumes that
eunuchs are defined by castration.

From these works, I have gathered several
hundred ancient references to eunuchs, and over the course of seven years,
I have assiduously looked up the primary sources in order to determine
whether eunuchs, or born eunuchs, met my three definitive criteria for
gay men. I checked primary sources in their original languages whenever
my language skills permitted, that is in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic,
and to some extent Egyptian and Akkadian. For ancient Indian sources, I
relied on translations,20 but they supported my findings
in Middle Eastern and Western sources.

Most of the references neither proved nor disproved
my hypothesis. The pre-Christian ancient writers were never specific in
defining a eunuch as lacking a penis and/or testicles. Many of them made
vague allusions to an imperfection, lack of power, femininity, or impotence,
which did not exclude either genital deformity or a gay man's kind of impotence
with women. A lot of them merely mentioned that a particular person was
a eunuch, period. Although I was sometimes discouraged during the first
few years because of not finding definitive proof that eunuchs and gay
men shared the same characteristics, the very fact that hundreds of references
did not exclude my hypothesis was cumulatively encouraging. With the overwhelming
number of sources failing to specify that eunuchs were castrated, it seemed
that I only needed to find one eunuch with a full set of genitals to throw
the burden of proof off of my hypothesis and onto the opposite view.

The evidence I eventually found was tailor-made
to prove my hypothesis. Eunuchs as a category were able to procreate
(except "if someone is a eunuch in such a way that he lacks a necessary
part of his body"), and they had a sexual aversion to women and an attraction
to men. Moreover, the early Indo-European cultures attacked them with the
same kind of negative stereotypes that are inflicted on gay men today.
But even more interesting was the reverence and appreciation enjoyed by
eunuchs in many non-Indo-European ancient cultures, for which eunuchs/homosexuals
assumed priestly roles.

In the following I will bring the citations
that were most relevant to proving my thesis. First, I will present quotes
from ancient works indicating -- and even stating categorically -- that
eunuchs could procreate. Then I will present quotes to the effect that
eunuchs avoided sexual interaction with women or were impotent with them.
This abstinence with respect to women was actually what defined the eunuch
in the ancient mind, so the category covered not only gay men but any man
who was unable or unwilling to have sex with women. Thirdly, lest the religious
homophobes try to insist eunuchs are simply impotents and sexual abstainers,
I also bring quotes demonstrating that eunuchs were known for sexually
pursuing and accommodating other men. Thus eunuchs are gay men, and gay
men are eunuchs.

Think about it. Jesus spoke specifically about
gay men in Matthew 19:12. He even said people might become eunuchs for
the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He did not anywhere say eunuchs should
avoid their own kind of sexual expression. The church's condemnation of
gay sexuality thus falls into the same category as its former hatred of
straight sexuality, namely the category of irrelevance. In fact, you could
even call it complicity in genocide, given the number of gay people who
have been tortured and killed, either by the church or with its condonation.

A lot of the ancient authors and works mentioned
on this website are unfamiliar even to well-educated people who are not
specialists in religious history, the Greek and Roman classics, and ancient
multicultural literature. I would like for this research to be meaningful
to a broad spectrum of people, and for that to be possible, it has to be
easy for people of all walks of life to follow. The argument I am making
is dividing into three sections. As stated above, the first section includes
quotes that show their authors felt eunuchs could procreate. The second
section contains quotes showing that their authors felt eunuchs were impotent
with or sexually turned off to women. The third section includes quotes
from authors attesting to the frequent sexual interaction between eunuchs
and other men.

What I intend to prove with these quotes is
that people living thousands of years ago all across Europe and Asia acknowledged
a certain category of men as different from the norm; that their difference
consisted in the fact that they had no sex drive toward women, while they
did enjoy sex with other men; and that their difference was conceived of
as natural and inborn. I will bring also evidence that some cultures recognized
that there were women who by nature had no lust for men. In sum, I intend
to prove that gay men and women existed in the ancient world as categories
distinguished from the norm.

I welcome any questions that readers may have.
You can direct them to my email address at <aquarius@well.com>.

Footnotes

1 Matthew 19:12. "For there are some eunuchs who are
born so from their mother's womb, and some eunuchs who are eunuchized by
men, and some eunuchs who eunuchize themselves for the sake of the kingdom
of the heavens. Let him who is able to receive it, receive it." Greek:
"Eisin gar eunouchoi hoitines ek koilias mêtros
egennêthêsan houtôs, kai eisin eunouchoi hoitines eunouchisthêsan
hupo tôn anthrôpôn, kai eisin eunouchoi hoitines eunouchisan
heautous dia tên basileian tôn ouranôn. ho dunamenos
chôrein chôreitô."

2 During my research I found that John J. McNeill
had put forth the same idea in a book which ultimately resulted in his
expulsion from the Catholic priesthood. He said about Matthew 19:12: "The
first category -- those eunuchs who have been so from birth -- is the closest
description we have in the Bible of what we understand today as a homosexual."
(John J. McNeill, The Church and the Homosexual, Fourth edition,
Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 65. First edition: 1976.) Later in the spring
of 1996, in the midst of a scandal at my
mainstream Baptist church when some gay members came out, I finally wrote out a version of my thesis to
show to some of my ministers. They were intrigued but not convinced. Within
a couple months, I came across a book by Rev. Nancy Wilson of MCC-LA that
put forward almost exactly the same arguments as I had put in my essay
at the time (Rev. Nancy Wilson, Our Tribe: Queer folks, God, Jesus,
and the Bible, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995).

3 For the Greek text of Matthew, I used The NRSV-NIV
Parallel New Testament in Greek and English, with interlinear translation
by Alfred Marshall, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990. This book uses the Greek
text of the 21st edition of Eberhard Nestle's Novum Testamentum Graece.
4 Bruno Meissner and Wolfram von Soden, Akkadisches
Handwörterbuch, Vol. II, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1965, p.
973b, under the word resu. This is a dictionary
of Akkadian, the parent language to Assyrian and Babylonian.

6 Yebamoth VIII, folios 79b-84a. Yebamoth is one of
the books of the Talmud. The Talmud is a collection of legal pronouncements,
called the mishnah, made by certain authoritative ancient Jewish rabbis,
as well as interpretations of these pronouncements, called the gemara,
made by later rabbis.

15 J. Bottero and H. Petschow, "Homosexualität,"
in Erich Ebeling and Bruno Meissner, eds., Reallexikon der Assyriologie
und vorderasiatischen Archäologie, Vol. 4. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1975, pp. 459-68. Although the alphabetization of this encyclopedia is
in German, this particular article is in French. Available in translation
on this website by clicking here. Use
"back" button to return here.

16 G. Meier, "Eunuch," in ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 485-486.
This article is in German. Available in translation on this website by
clicking here. Use "back" button to return here.

17 David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality,
Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988. The reference to the article by Bottero
and Petschow is on page 126. Greenberg discusses Assyrian and Babylonian
eunuchs in Chapter 3: "Inequality and the State: Homosexual Innovations
in Archaic Civilizations" and Chapter 4: "Early Civilizations: Variations
on Homosexual Themes." He discusses homosexuality in Africa on pp.
60-62 in Chapter 2: "Homosexual Relations in Kinship-Structured Societies."
18 Zia Jaffrey, The Invisibles: A Tale of the
Eunuchs of India, New York: Pantheon, 1996. This is a very interesting
book by an Indian-American woman from New York who went to live and study
in India for a period of time. One day at a wedding there, she became intrigued
by some strange men dressed in women's clothing who showed up on the doorstep
of the reception and sang songs for money. She began researching their
lives and cultural heritage, and wrote this book about what she discovered.

19 Yogesh Shingala Vyas, M.D., The Life Style of
the Eunuchs, New Delhi: Anmol Publications; Delhi: Distributed by Anupama
Publishers and Distributors, 1987. This is a study intended to inspire
social policy initiatives to help Indian eunuchs, who are called hijras.
Hijras
are gay men and transgenders usually from rural areas, who join or are
brought by their parents to houses of eunuchs in nearby urban areas. By
tradition they let themselves be castrated, which is a holdover from the
requirement of medieval royal courts that all eunuchs be man-made eunuchs.
Both this book and Jaffrey's book indicated that the younger generation
of hijras has grown resistant to the castration
tradition, and it is being done less and less.

20The Laws of Manu, with an introduction and
notes, translated by Wendy Doniger with Brian K. Smith, New York: Penguin,
1991. Vatsyayana, Das Kamasutram des Vatsyayana, Dr. Ferdinand Leiter
und Dr. Hans H. Thal, eds., Vienna: Verlag Schneider & Co., 1929. Dr.
Magnus Hirschfeld, the founder of the Institute for Sexual Research in
Berlin and an early leader in the German gay rights movement, wrote a foreword
to this "first complete German edition" of the Kamasutra.